King Rat

It's because the last thing sophie wants to do is actually communicate. yeh. I've tried to pin him/her down on several occassions and he/she just squirts out an ink cloud and jets away. yeh.

The Other Michael

There are chimps that can communicate with humans via AmeSLan, forming coherent sentences and conveying meaningful thoughts. Are they equipped with souls, even though they are not on the main evolutionary track to h. sap? Or do they get souls because they share the vast majority of their DNA with humans? Or are they just left out in the cold?

cheers,
Michael

sophie

What would these chimps do if left to their own devices? Grow beards and cultivate banana plantations? Or would they pound on the phone for more human type communication?

crocodile deathroll

I subscibe more to the that it is not so much the individual organism that possesses a soul but the universe as a whole. The universe accidently through its evolution stumbled on a means to be aware of its own existence. The consciousness on the universe would just be masked out to the trajectory through space and time of one organism until is sees out its life, which just happens to be you at the moment. Then the death of that organism creates a gestalt switch to another one as just a passive observer and not at all a creator.

I just feel as humanity made an epistemological leap when it stopped believing in multiple deities for animism to polytheism of pagans then monotheism of Zoroastrian/Judeo-Christians, then the Atheism and multiple soul world of Epicurus. And now there may be only one soul as a passive observer and no God.

Biff the unclean

Since this is what I do for a living (with gorillas not chimps) I can tell you. The reason they take so well to speaking in ASL (GSL in our case) is that they communicate with one another in the wild mainly through gesture. Only a small part of their communication is vocal because the placement of their vocal cords prevents speech.
Except for one bonobo back east (I won't mention where) who has started to speak in understandable English about 8 months ago. No one is quite sure what to make of this.
The gorillas I work with understand spoken (2000+ words) and written English (at 2nd or 3rd grade level). They cannot speak at all, except by signing. Though sometimes when they see me they will mouth the words "Hello (my name)" and gave a little wave. No sound comes out though.

Icky

Well, hey, it wouldn't be heaven without there was rack of lamb and rib-eye steak to eat.